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Seductive Conversions: Experience the Difference, Molly Schwartz, University of Malmö

This installation is intended to create a multimodal experience that dives into a scene from Submission, Michel Houellebecq’s latest work of speculative fiction. In this scene we experience an alternative reality in which women have lost all autonomy and are permanently submissive to men, yet we perceive how this state of affairs could be beneficial for both men and women. The installation is meant to question the generative nature of narratives and the feedback loop between writer and reader by alternatively decoupling and reuniting images of events in the novel from their corresponding text.

First, hold up the 3-D View-Master stereoscope to your eyes and put on a pair of headphones. The stereoscope is supposed to contain a reel of seven images in the illustrations.

Then, press play to start the sound file and then look into the stereoscope at the first image. After the first track of the sound track comes to an end, flip the switch on the stereoscope (also known as "dropping the guillotine”) and move to the next audio track.

One sound file is an audio recording of the text from Submission, so the text of the novel corresponds with the visual images. One sound file is an audio recording of an excerpt from Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. The third sound file is an audio recording of an excerpt from J.K. Huysmans’ À Rebours.

While the three textual excerpts have common themes and literary devices, their pairings with the images will create three very different narrative experiences for the participants, highlighting that the meaning of content lies in the participants’ experience of it.

more details here